ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the potential utility of American pragmatism to Critical Management Studies (CMS), specifically in regard to internecine debates about its ability to influence public policy and real-world management practices. These disputes continue to rage and have included voices from within and without the CMS movement for well over a decade, the latest example being Ahu Tatli's On the Power and Poverty of Critical Reflection in CMS. The chapter gives some color about pragmatism's ability to challenge the hegemony of right-wing ideas at anything other than an epistemological level, particularly in the midst of an entirely ideological climate of global austerity. It demonstrates how pragmatist ideas may be of little use to CMS, assuming its practitioners truly do wish to break out of the institutional trap of self-referentiality and pre-packaged approach culture that seems to have prevailed. Pragmatism may be concerned with last things or facts, but not their stability, or the usefulness of assuming their stability.
